


A Little Bit Ruined

by rm (arem)



Series: Too Soon and Always [17]
Category: Glee
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-08
Updated: 2012-10-08
Packaged: 2017-11-15 20:52:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/531568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arem/pseuds/rm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rachel comes to visit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Little Bit Ruined

Rachel calls on a Tuesday evening when Kurt's unhappily serving drinks to a bachelorette party that keeps telling him he's adorable and beseeching him to sing “something gay.”

The tour, she says – her van, Kurt thinks a little viciously – is headed to Richmond, and after, they have a whole forty-nine hours off.

“Can I come stay with you? I mean, I'm not supposed to, but they're all planning all sorts of irresponsibility, and if I'm getting fired from this tour, I'd far rather it be for visiting you than for not stopping them from having a drunken orgy in the costumes.”

“Rachel,” Kurt says firmly. “I have my own unpleasant alcoholics to deal with right now. Can I call you back?”

“I just need to get away,” she whines.

“Fine,” Kurt snaps. “Work it out with Blaine,” he says, shoving his phone at his boyfriend as his swings his hips past the Kurt Hummel cheering section, plunks his tray down on the bar and heads to the mic armed with the vicious little song he sings for all the bachelorettes.

He used to feel bad about the self-indulgence of it, but that was before Blaine pointed out that straight people insisting on performances in congratulations of something the performers can't actually do is rude.

*

“So, Rachel's coming to stay,” Blaine says as he starts the car to drive them home.

“I didn't think you'd tell her no.”

“Is this going to make you crazy?”

“I can't imagine why you'd think that. She's going to weep about her tour, hog our piano and upstage me at work. Honestly, it sounds perfect,” Kurt says with less bite than he could.

“So you're braced then?” Blaine chuckles.

“So braced.”

*

As Kurt sits in their car waiting for Rachel at the bus station Friday afternoon, he drums his hands on the steering wheel and thinks about all the times Blaine has sucked him off in this parking lot in the dark. It looks different in the light, more sordid and less desperate, and Kurt has one of those moments where his chest aches with how much love he's in.

Of course, Rachel, in jeans and a sweatshirt and carrying a hiker's backpack, interrupts by knocking on his window. Kurt hits the button to roll it down.

“Running away from home, little girl?” he asks, cracking himself up as he does it.

“Only with you,” she says.

*

When Blaine gets home, Rachel's sprawled across their couch and Kurt is sitting at the piano, randomly plonking away. There's a melody there, but he seems to be only playing every third phrase of it; Blaine chalks that up both to Rachel's presence and Kurt's general lack of love for the piano as anything but a tool. He always, always, prefers to have someone else play for him, and Blaine has always been happy to oblige.

“What are you working on?” he asks, as he sets his bag down and gives Kurt a kiss.

“I'm not, really. But werewolves, vaguely.”

“Ah, werewolves,” Blaine says. Halloween, like bachelorette parties, is another one of those things that piano bars apparently just have to be prepared for.

“Life,” Rachel says, announces as she stares at the ceiling, having completely ignored their exchange.

“How's that going?”

“I've run away from a children's theater tour in Richmond, Virginia to sleep on your couch, how do you think?”

“She's just bitter because I'm not willing to sit up all night braiding her hair and talking about boys,” Kurt says.

“You can, if you want.”

“You just want to know what we'd say about you,” Rachel teases.

“Yeah, pretty much,” Blaine says cheerfully. “So are we cooking or is this a takeout thing?”

*

“I don't want to go back,” Rachel says five hours later as the three of them sit on the floor surrounded by a sea of Chinese food containers. Blaine is painting her nails the required tour baby pink, and Kurt's just watching the whole thing incredulously. Occasionally the variety of modes to Blaine's homosexuality still surprises him.

“That would be a very, very stupid life choice,” Kurt says.

“You don't understand --”

“I understand Equity card, Rachel.”

“It wasn't supposed to be like this! And everyone in my van --”

“Your tour,” he corrects.

“My van,” she snaps back, “hates me.”

“Kurt isn't supposed to be living in DC, either,” Blaine says softly, setting down her left hand as he finishes it and picks up her right.

“That's different,” she says sullenly.

“Really, how's that?” Kurt asks, full of assumptions and preemptively angry.

Blaine shifts back slightly so that when they start inevitably yelling at each other and someone has a diva storm-out he doesn't accidentally wind up with nail polish all over his jeans.

“You have a reason to wait,” Rachel says, “I don't.”

Blaine doesn't look up from her nails, continuing to brush the color gently over them like she's really the child she's playing in her show.

“He's not waiting,” he says firmly before she and Kurt can start in on a vicious rehash of high school. “If he got a tour, he'd go. If he got a gig in New York, he'd go. He wouldn't be running himself into the ground the way he is if we weren't prepared for him to take opportunity when it comes.”

“But how can you do that?” she asks.

“We know what we signed up for,” Kurt says, his voice firm and harsh, because he and Blaine have never, actually discussed this before. It's been understood, of course, but it feels different, in that great and terrible way people generally use for god, to hear it.

“I'm sorry that you're lonely, Rachel,” Blaine says softly.

“Don't cry,” Kurt says as she's about to. “You'll start trembling, and he'll mess your nails”

“It's true,” he admits congenially. “Less practice.”

*

“Well, that felt like my good deed for the year,” Blaine says softly when they're in bed, Kurt in his nicest pajamas because they have a guest lurking in their living room.

“I'm worried about her,” Kurt says.

“Yeah, well. She's having a time of it right now.”

“I don't think she's been happy since home.”

“That's because she hasn't found another one,” Blaine says, snuggling into Kurt's arms.

Kurt chuckles and runs his fingers through his curls. “What would you do, really, if I got a can't say no sort of something?”

“I survived Rome,” Blaine says a little defensively.

“You also survived Shanghai,” Kurt teases.

“I think... I think I do better when I'm the one staying.”

“Okay,” Kurt says. “Because I'd worry. Not about us. But you. I see it, you know.”

“What?”

“The way you hold your breath in the face of pretty much everything.”

“It's getting better.”

“That is also true,” Kurt says, kissing the top of his head.

“There's no way you're willing to have sex with her in the other room is there?” Blaine asks, partly as a diversionary tactic and partly because he just feels like he needs the closeness and obliteration of it.

“Not on your life.”

*

When Kurt gets up in the night, he finds Rachel on the couch, staring into the dark.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

He shrugs. “Blaine sleeps like the dead. I don't,” he says, padding into the kitchen to heat up some milk.

“What woke you up?” she asks, and Kurt wonders if she, in typical Rachel fashion, somehow thinks it was her.

“Blaine snores a little, you know?” he says, not sure why he's talking about it. “And his breath catches sometimes, like... he just stops. For a moment. It wakes me up.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Oh. Did you want milk?”

“Does that actually help?”

“Not really, but it gives me something to do.”

*

They wind up sitting on the couch, each of them leaning back against an arm and facing each other, having what Kurt thinks is the most intimate conversation he's ever had with her. He doesn't know what to do with the fact that she's never checked to see if someone is still breathing in the night, and she wonders (aloud, to him, finally) if he finds it weird to think that he'll never sleep with anyone other than Blaine.

“Mostly I'm just very, very grateful,” he says.

“You should be.”

“Not just because he's him.”

She makes a face at him to go on, knowing he already intends to tell.

“I find people very hard, like I could poison most of them by touching. I've never really gotten over that. And I'm not sure I can.”

“You never worried about touching me.”

“You were already poisoned.”

*

“What's going on?” Blaine asks sleepily as he leans in the bedroom door and startles the both.”

“Go back to sleep, sweetie,” Kurt says. “Rachel and I are chatting; I'll be in soon, okay?”

“Okay,” he says, nodding and scrubbing at his face before turning and closing the door behind him.

“That's adorable,” Rachel says.

Kurt shrugs. “I feel bad. Me not being there is really the only thing that gets him up in the night.”

“God,” she says.

“What?”

“Finn was always like, 'You're too warm, get away; oh wait, boobs.'”

“Wow, I never needed to know that.”

*

“You okay?” Blaine murmurs when Kurt gets back in bed.

“Nothing other than the usual,” Kurt says as Blaine shifts into his side and lays a hand on his chest.

Kurt takes it in his own and slips it up under his pajama top, pressing it over bare skin.

“Invitation?” Blaine asks.

Kurt makes a non-committal sound. “Rachel's still in the next room. And you're half asleep.”

“Nothing she'll hear then,” he says and drags his hand down, pausing at the waistband of Kurt's pajamas.

Normally he would just say no, but Kurt's heart feels a little raw and so he gives up and shoves his pajama bottoms down; he seriously doubts Blaine's awake enough to be of any real help beyond the obvious.

“Come're,” he murmurs then, pulling Blaine's dick out of his boxers and taking it in hand with his own.

“God,” Blaine rasps.

“Shhhhhh,” Kurt reminds him.

“I really needed this,” he says.

“I know. Me too. Quiet now,”

It's awkward and dry and Kurt's half holding his breath because Rachel, but Blaine comes first and fast and then wakes up enough to finish off him off, the pads of his fingers twisting over the head of Kurt's cock in a ridiculously overwhelming way.

“Shit,” Kurt breathes as he spurts over Blaine's hand, his boyfriend laughing at him warmly.

“Tell me you have the energy to clean us up,” Kurt, now laughing himself, gasps. “Because I do not.”

“Sorry,” Blaine says, shaking his head. “But you're going to have to sleep in pornographic filth.”

*

In the morning, they take Rachel, who makes no indication she heard anything in the night, to breakfast. Her smile doesn't even seem forced when Kurt informs her she'll be joining his motley crew of assorted fans and hangers on at the bar that evening.

“Truly,” Kurt says, and explains not about George, but about how he pretty much destroyed Blaine's chances of having any appropriate grad school friendships.

Rachel cackles through the whole tale because it's a good story and Kurt tells it well, but Blaine can see the way she's pained in the creases by her eyes, and when Kurt excuses himself to the restroom, he tells her as much.

“Kurt's always had a sense of humor about ruining things,” she says.

“Maybe Kurt just knows they were already a little bit ruined before he got there.”

She wonders if she should tell Blaine about the poison.

*

“Tonight is a very special occasion,” Kurt says, leaning into the mic and bouncing on his toes at the opening of his first three song set. “My best friend in the whole world is here on leave without absence from a children's theater tour.”

There's a gasp from a table in the back left. Kurt points at them. “Professional actors?” he asks, and gets a nod, which he returns enthusiastically.

“Professional actors,” he confirms for the room. “They know. They're not gasping because my friend ran away; they're gasping because she has just run away from hell. Tragically, however, we have to send her back in the morning. But! One day she's going to belong to Broadway, and all of you – and a significant minority of eight-year-olds on the eastern seaboard – will have heard her first. Rachel, get your booty up here.”

There are whoops and catcalls for her as she goes. Some of it, of course, comes from their friends, but some of it is just the product of a rowdy bar on a Saturday night.

“Hi,” she says sheepishly into the mic. “Kurt and I went to high school together.”

“Rachel has two dads,” Kurt explains.

“And his voice is the only real competition I've ever had.”

“You think you remember this?” he asks her after nodding to the pianist to start.

“You did warn me!” she says indignantly.

Kurt sighs and tsks into the microphone. “She's not used to the patter yet,” he says, before taking a breath and beginning his part. When Rachel comes in, under and then over him, flawless and gentle, he knows they've sold it and so he sings every note just for the pure round pleasure of it.

When the applause comes, his friends banging on their table and cheering, Kurt smirks, so pleased with himself. “Rachel Berry, everyone. When she becomes a star, remember you heard her here first.”

Rachel goes up on her toes, throws her arms around his neck, and picks one foot off the floor, the whole hug an expression of happiness clearly learned from movies.

Kurt kisses her forehead. “Go sit. I have to sing a ridiculous bullfighting song now. You can fight with the rest of our fine patrons for more mic time when I'm done.”

*

When Kurt finally has a moment to drop down at their table near the end of what has proved to be a very busy and he thinks lucrative night, George is braiding Rachel's hair and Rachel is insisting that Henry must be bisexual.

“Well this is awkward,” Kurt declares as he settles himself onto Blaine's lap.

“You should have seen it earlier,” Seanna notes.

“I don't want to know.”

“Just because no one can resist Lizzy's charms doesn't mean I want to suck his dick.”

“Oh. My. God,” Kurt says.

Kate pats his shoulder sympathetically.

“Can't I just have friends,” Kurt asks, his voice far more tinged with hysteria than he means it to be, “without it being about what I do and don't do to them?”

Blaine tightens his arms around his waist.

“You do,” Henry says, reaching for Kurt's hand. “You totally do.”

“Thank you,” he says.

“Sorry, Kurt, I didn't mean --” Rachel starts.

He lets go of Henry's hands and waves her apology away. “You never do,” he says, before leaning over to kiss the tip of her nose. “Poison too,” he whispers at her when her face is just millimeters from his.

Blessedly, she smiles.

*

In the morning, Kurt takes her and her runaway pack back to the bus station.

“Blaine always drops me off here, when I go up to New York,” he says.

“That's sweet of him,” she says, her voice awkward in anticipation of whatever point Kurt is trying to make.

“It screws up his sleep schedule and makes me feel guilty. When he first started doing it, I thought it was because he was terrified I wouldn't come back.”

“Isn't he?”

“Yeah. He probably is. But eventually, I figured out that he also does it so that when I finally get a yes, I will absolutely know that he was the last person to see me as I once was.”

Rachel smiles at him, full of wonder.

Kurt nods at her and then kisses her cheek. “All right, go get your bus. You don't want to be late, Rachel Berry.”

“My fans are waiting?” she teases, but Kurt just nods.

“They are,” he says. “They are.”

*

When he gets home, Blaine's sitting up in bed reading.

“What's this?” Kurt asks.

“I knew you wanted to come back to bed, but I figured that meant with me in it.”

Kurt shakes his head, but shucks off his shirt and then climbs in next to him.

“Thanks for being so good with Rachel this weekend.”

“She was kind of intense,” Blaine admits.

“Did you expect something different?” Kurt asks, honestly curious.

“I expected it to have less meaning.”

“Yeah. I get that.”

“You still jealous?” Blaine asks turning onto his side.

“Of her Equity card? Sure. Would I trade places with her? Not for a second.”

“You would never get a yes and not tell me, right?” Blaine asks after a long silence.

Kurt peers at him curiously, fascinated that anyone could have that much faith and fear in him. “Of course not,” he says, still startled. It doesn't help that it's a little bit harder to say than he anticipated.

But Blaine just gives him an easy grin and a gentle kiss. “Good,” he says. Good, and Kurt feels like he's taking his first breath.

**Author's Note:**

> Kurt's nasty song for bachelorette parties is Emilie Autumn's "Marry Me." What Kurt means by "werewolves" is the Echo's Children version of "Least of My Kind." The mash-up in questions is the Happy Days/Come On Get Happy one from the show. Finally, the ridiculous bullfighting song is Marc Almond's "Torreador in the Rain."


End file.
